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“Fuck.” His voice breaks rough through his teeth. “Yes.”

The way he gives me the word makes heat spike through me so hard my vision blurs. Not because it sounds like surrender, but because it doesn’t. It sounds like choice dragged out of him raw, like he knows exactly what he wants and hates how much I can hear it.

I roll my hips down onto him, slowly, and he makes a sound low in his throat, his whole body going rigid beneath mine, his hands tightening on my thighs like he is afraid I will stop.

Lost in the feel of him, I take one of his hands and drag it up my body, over my stomach, over my ribs, until his palm closes around my breast. He goes still for half a breath, like even now some ruined part of him is waiting to be told he’s allowed.

So, I press into his touch.

That does it.

His other hand follows, rough and shaking, and Malek Vane touches me like restraint is something he’s actively surviving. His thumbs move over me with a slow, brutal patience that has my breath catching in pieces, my thighs trembling, the edge sharpening until every sound in Marrow Ridge narrows to his hands and my own pulse answering them.

My breath turns ragged, and the world narrows to friction and heat and the altar beneath us, blackened with old ash like it has been waiting for the wrong kind of prayer.

“Don’t you dare stop, Selah Crow.” His voice is wrecked now, reverent in the ugliest, truest way, and his eyes don’t leave my face. “Let me watch you come apart.”

He pulls in a breath like it hurts, his hands tightening just enough to make my pulse jump.

“Let this place hear something it didn’t ruin.”

With that I detonate on top of him. Sound, sense, anything but the surge ripping through me like a hymn that forgot how to be holy.

“There,” Malek breathes, wrecked. “That’s my girl. Beautiful.”

He fists my hair and pulls my head back, baring my throat the way you bare a blade before you cut. The air hits the skin there and I shudder, exposed in the harshest, truest way.

Ash smears across me under his hands—dark fingerprints, sacred grime—like the altar is claiming me too, or maybe it’s just him.

Maybe that’s the same thing.

Malek bites along the column of my throat. "Finish what you started little crow.”

The words land heavy in my body—command and devotion braided together so tight I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I pull in a breath that stutters, not from fear, not from cold, but from the way he says it like he trusts me to take him apart and still stay.

I rise slowly, because I want him to watch. Because something in me needs him to see that I’m choosing this—choosing him—on purpose.

His gaze follows every inch like he’s starving and I’m the only thing he’s ever wanted that didn’t come wrapped in scripture and punishment. The altar holds him flat and exposed, shirtless, soot smeared across his skin like the place is trying to claim him. Like it’s already tried and failed.

He looks carved out of ruin.

He looks like mine.

I take in the wreck of him—ash and scars and that wild, contained tremor in his hands—and for a second I have the vicious thought that if the world needed a saint, it chose wrong.

Because Malek was never built to be holy.

He was built to endure.

I lean down, not gentle, not hurried, and press my mouth to the scar on his chest—the old seam where he was bound, where something tried to stitch him to a faith that only knew how to hurt. I kiss it like I’m rewriting the story there, like I’m laying my own vow over the wound.

Then I catch his belt loop and pull, hauling him up just enough to make his breath break.

His hands instantly find my body, touching every inch of me. I pull him down and give him a searing kiss.

“Now take back what this place tried to steal from you.”

He takes one shuddering breath before spinning me around to face the altar, my back flush with his front and kicks my feet apart and in the next breath his thick head of his cock is rubbing between my legs, bumping my clit deliciously.